An essential feature of games is that you win or lose.

Self-awarenesd is just what happens when information about the self changes. Even atoms have a modicum of self-awareness. They are forced to distinguish themselves from outside interaction.

Just because you don't have a highly developed id or ego doesn't mean you're completely unaware of yourself. Even dogs have a self, and they are perfectly aware of it.

It's all information. Even empty space. It informs you about what your environment is like.

I'm just here out of whimsy, and I like to try and get a glimpse of reality.

Yes, I guess what I'm saying is we can't possibly say beyond a shadow of a doubt how they ultimately relate...only how they seem to relate from a human perspective.

Because even, hypothetically, if qualia were just your brain, you can't prove your brain is any good at measuring what your brain is. We just assume the chemicals therein are self-reflective, but in reality they may produce a universal abstraction. People do hallucinate. And dream.

Ultimately I think we need to consider that communication is the exertion of the essence of a thing physically outside of the confines of its body. That's where qualia is. A rose communicates. Information is shared. It effects us each differently, and, like it or not, becomes a part of our essence, which travels outside of the body. If it were all inside, no one would be able to see us. Truly we are star stuff, all projecting the light, all belonging to the light. And it's all just communication.

I seriously doubt that our brains relay information accurately. To me, this is not only a hard problem, but an impossible problem. How do you prove that the chemicals in your brain accurately relay what reality is back to you?

In actuality we could be a transfer of information that is abstract and alien to our senses. You could live in an intricate video game and pick apart all the ins and outs of your reality without ever realizing that the whole thing was a cartridge in a system.

Yes, but I'm asking what the implications are if someone is watching you, and, without observing it, you somehow know it.

I think you're taking your inevitable demise too harshly and projecting it on other people. You think it justifies you somehow, but really you're just a joke.

I pity you. But it's too late for you; you made sure of that. You do have worth, however, and life will teach you that.

You may as well try to learn now. I mean, there's little sense in being deliberately stupid. But I doubt you will. I think you're just an ornery little puke.

Y

You are the jerk, foghorn.

If there was trust money wouldn't be involved. It's a contract, and people that trust each other don't need them.

I don't demand perfection. But I believe in good hearts. The more light, the deeper the shadows. But I'd rather confront them in the light than in the dark.

It's funny that we, as humans, believe we can imagine the absence of all being, yet even when we do we're technically imagining something. Which begs the question, can nothing exist? Even in order to exist it must be something

It's literally going to take a miracle to get people to stop being dicks

Because I'm a man and a man has nothing else to do. I just go through the motions. If people want to be jerks, it's not really my problem.

I can easily picture being redflagged by Google just for not being status quo. It's the same old story everywhere I go.

At the end of my life I'll determine who was trustworthy. Until then I'll just wait for the other shoe to drop. Everywhere I've been I've just encountered lowly people.

Emotions are tied up in identity, and identity can't really be explained. It just is what it is and is self-explanatory. You can talk about inputs and outputs all day, but that will explain nothing as far as emotions filtered through a particular identity.

There isn't one standard for anger or love. There are as many variants of emotion as there are people.

Corporations are only as good as the society that invests in them. I don't trust Google any more than I trust the lot of you, which isn't very much. You'll ostracized people for no other reason than they disagree with you, and Google is the same.

Without a deeper examination of psychic phenomena reported by conscious observers, we will never get any closer to understanding the nature of consciousness.

Unfortunately, most scientist disregard witness reports out of hand and, for some reason, think they can explain it away studying neurons. If you don't see why that's absurd, I'm not going to explain it to you.

I hypothesize that it's a feedback loop. The brain creates a timeless field of perception, which in turn influences the brain's development. It's a case of the chicken or the egg. But the yolk is still real.

I'm just wondering, if, hypothetically speaking, it were a real phenomenon, what would the implication be?

I have experienced it plenty, but I have no idea what it means in regard to, I suppose, consciousness or awareness. I just wish someone had some insight.

I suppose that the mind somehow can influence other bodies without direct contact. But I have no idea what this suggests.

So if anyone could humor the hypothetical and provide some insight, it would be appreciated.

Never.mind.

There is no burden here. Just food for thought. If you have no idea, just say so or don't bother responding. I have nothing to prove.

You are dumb.

Quack.

You guys keep talking about the physical, but none of you know what that means. Particle or wave? You can't even determine that. The Uncertainty Principal. Perspective: completely limited. So I don't even understand what you're saying when you say qualia is physical, and I know you don't know either.

The real problem, as I see it, is one of identity. Why would a bunch of dead, lifeless matter, in any assemblage, believe it is a person. All of us knowing what being a person entails. If everything is dead and lifeless, I can't imagine how this could be the case. It would be a cruel abberation, and I certainly see no evolutionary advantage to it.

So what do we do? We roll back. It's all an illusion and means nothing. I've never heard a more elegant formula for slavery.

So you're saying time is created by dreams?

One problem: I never asserted that dreams were non temporal.

So?

An even harder question is whether or not the brain is a formidable tool for ascertaining reality as it is. I would argue that it probably isn't. It's just too small and personal to grasp the over extending hierarchy of the universe.

We only experience time when we're awake, too. Does that mean time is a product of the brain. You would say no, because another observer can detect its passing. Yet mind does have a relationship to time, and what is the nature of that relationship.

So, no, the nature of mind isn't entirely located in the brain. A faucet can produce water, and if you were a caveman you might believe it creates water. But that no water comes out when it's off doesn't explain the origin of water. When it comes out when it's on doesn't tell us anything about the nature of water.

Similarly, conscious subjective experience may seem to be generated by the brain, but this tells us nothing about the properties of subjective awareness. We have no idea if it forms oceans that evaporate and rain back down to earth.

You can't feel unaffected. To feel is to be affected. Yet, you can feel unaffected.

So instead of saying we're feeling emotional, we should be saying we're feeling affected? And the words themselves are emotional, and we must be feeling emotional or we wouldn't have expressed our feelings?

So we're both affected and emotional, even though emotions can create an affect?

But even if, hypothetically speaking, the mind is purely the product of the brain, this tells us nothing about the quality of the mind.

The brain is constantly posited as something mundane, as if that's just common sense, but it isn't. Are our computers mundane? Our iPad's?

Yet they are nowhere near the complexity of the human brain.

You can say it's all an accident, but the universe is not accidental. It's arbitrary. It happens to be so, just as the mind happens to be so. It's not an illusion. Being a product of the brain wouldn't make it an illusion.

How can the thing that keeps this all cohesive for us be an illusion. If the mind is an illusion, then everything is an illusion.

Clearly, the mind is real. Even illusions are, technically, "real." Ie. they do occur in objective reality. Likewise, the mind isn't something we can snap out of. It's something, and not because of a preference that it be something.

It's what allows us to have thoughts at all. And thoughts are defined as relating to emotion. If we had no minds, we wouldn't exist. But we do exist. Therefore, the mind exists.

God is the creation of language. And we trust in language. At the very least, it's the highest pinnacle of intelligent thought. It's something good and true and eternal we cannot help but strive for. All technicalities aside.

But I don't think we can know the meaning of intelligent thought until we're absolutely certain where we are. And without total perspective, we can never be sure.

Women enable men to be dullards in every possible way. What women want is a man who misses the point completely. Women are the backbone of the patriarchy.

I don't buy it.

Analyze your emotions until you feel nothing but despair and see how happy you are.

How absurd is it that we entertain such thoughts. "Your identity isn't real." Do you realize how messed up that statement is?

Is it all a part of some greater philosophy that posits us all as drones? It's absurd and extremely dangerous.

The meaning of illusion doesn't even suffice. We live it every day; it is real.

"Feels" like it is real is just an underhanded way of saying it seems like it is real, and all we have to go on is how things seem. And it seems a nefarious thing to say to me, that the mind is an illusion. That's something a serial killer would say.

Maybe sometimes people get too close to truth and are ignored in favor of being lost.

I think I reflect on my choices, and it makes me behave differently, but the main thing is there is an unalterable I this is all filtered through. I could be a different man and handle adversity completely differently.

I don't understand people who think their identity is in flux. I am entwined with 7 year-old me as much as I am 39 year-old me. The identity that controls who I am becoming hasn't changed.

Maybe others just aren't as comfortable with this as I am. Maybe they want a different identity, to excuse the mistakes and shortcomings. I'm fundamentally the same person I've always been, though. I remember exactly what it was like to see through my eyes as a child. And my conscience has always been the same.

It was probably created by a woman as some ancient vocalizations for "Do you want sex?" She and her mate both knew instinctively what "unga bunga?" meant.

It wasn't necessarily an evolutionary leap. It was just a fun noise for her to make when she got horny. And he was mystified by her prowess.

Then he turned around and started doing it, too, assuming that if his fellow cavemen weren't dumb, they'd know what "ngh" meant.

You're really this obtuse, aren't you.

Philosophy is the endeavor of dumb, uptight people to try and boost their egos. At least 75% of the time.